Why do they think in this short-sighted way? The reason is simple: it is a hard-wired part of our Palaeolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring – even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them. The long view that might have saved their distant descendants required a vision and extended altruism instinctively difficult to marshal.The great dilemma of environmental reasoning stems from this conflict between short-term and long-term values. To select values for the near future of one’s own tribe or country is relatively easy. To select values for the distant future of the whole planet also is relatively easy – in theory at least.

To combine the two visions to create a universal environmental ethic is, on the other hand, very difficult. But combine them we must, because a universal environmental ethic is the only guide by which humanity and the rest of life can be safely conducted through the bottleneck into which our species has foolishly blundered.© Edward O Wilson 2002. Extracted from ‘The Future of Life’ published by Little, Brown on 4 April (£17.99 hardback). Time for the Fantasy Fiction League? The comedian David Baddiel joins his former Cambridge tutor Lisa Jardine on the judging panel for this year’s Booker.

Also gathered under the chair of Professor Jardine are the novelists Salley Vickers (see above) and Russell Celyn Jones, and Erica Wagner of The Times. Booker plc’s owner, Iceland (now renamed “The Big Food Group”), is withdrawing from the prize sponsorship, but at a glacier’s pace. Some little bookish birds suggest that ample replacement sponsorship from a blue-chip institution is already more or less agreed, but that Iceland is holding up the public transfer – perhaps because it realises how daft it was to let the Booker go. But his brief defection to HarperCollins turned out to be a way of getting his regular house, Jonathan Cape, to cough up the sort of money suited to his new status as literary superstar Amis’s conduct has an echo this spring with Graham Swift.

Though he hasn’t changed agents (remaining with the fleet-footed, silver-tongued Caradoc King of A P Watt), the Booker-winner for Last Orders is, it seems, asking for more money than Picador – where he is edited by the deep and dedicated Peter Straus – is prepared to spend. Unlike Amis, he has also put his backlist on the market, and would thus deprive Picador of one of its stars. Select editors are assessing Swift’s latest manuscript before making their sealed bids.* Flushed with her latest literary success – her new novel, Star Quality, has apparently sold 28,000 copies – Joan Collins has embarked on a new magnum opus. This time it’s a beauty-and-exercise book, Joan’s Way, for which the mild-mannered Jeremy Robson of Robson Books has paid more money than he’s ever paid for anything.